Currently Reading or Recommend.

What I'm listening to on iTunes.

February 23, 2006

My first thoughts about this are, what took a company so long to come up with or develop this idea. I'm sure that in conjunction with one of the HDTV developers, this ought to be a piece of cake. I can see family time around the coffee table/computer as kids work on homework and Mom and Dad can get involved in the process too. It also works for planning events, vacations, and then deciding what to do with all the plethora of pictures you took on vacation or at the prom. I'd imagine that a type of LCD screen or DLP technology would work for the screen of this size. I can also see plenty of third party applications for interfacing the Coffee Table PC with the rest of your electronic/entertainment gadgets that you currently have or will soon acquire. Bottom line, is this just some engineer's pipe dream, vapor ware or will it actually see development? Inquiring minds want to know.

HP celebrated its 40th anniversary of selling overpriced printer ink by revealing Misto, a concept from its labs that combines a coffee table with a touch-screen PC. The giant screen, of undetermined resolution, would be used by a group, which would gather around and play board games, look at maps, or arrange pictures for viewing. Since it's just a concept, there is no indication of when or if it will be developed, and if so how much it will cost. No question, it certainly won't be cheap—this is a coffee table that doesn't exactly invite you to put up your feet.

February 22, 2006

I was in one of these closing locations this morning. They are closing within the week, and I'd imagine it will be a quick turn over to the Starbucks store. Yes the customers and employees that I overheard conversing, were not happy about the loss of the Peaberry storefront. The other loss is 11 locations of free wi-fi, in the Denver Metro area.

February 21, 2006

WINKsite has helped Metroblogginggo mobile across their network of 42 cities. We’re excited to be working with Sean, Jason and the rest of the Metroblogging Team.

Special thanks to Andy and Gordon over at Upcoming.org for adding some new tricks to their event feeds. With their help we were able to provide some additional mobile goodness for the Metroblogging Community (more on that in my next post.)

Just fire up a mobile browser and head over to http://cityname.metblogs.com/mobile/ and check it out on your phone.

Alternatively, select one of the metro links below to view it’s mobile site from our desktop emulator.

February 06, 2006

After a few months of part-time work and getting the travel bug out of my system, I’m back to work full-time as CEO of Wireless Ink. DaveH and Jason have pursued the promise of mobile communities for years and built the right foundation to soar from. They’ve already attracted tens of thousands of users who are passionate about us and who will lead us down the right path as we grow.

Gratifyingly, Feedster angels are starting to sign up to this deal, even though I’m only now focusing on the fundraising aspect of it. Here’s the basics of the company description so far:

Wireless Ink Corp (aka WINKsite, http://winksite.com) ties mobile users back into the user-generated Internet and to each other. WINKsite makes it simple for publishers to connect with their users on the move, and easy for those users to find their peers — mobile or not — based on shared interests or locations. The result is rich, focused communities that span mobile and broadband experiences.
Mobile publishing has always been a choice between over-investment and user neglect. Creating new mobile sites remains more art than science; the price tag remains high and the talent rare. Automated web-to-mobile site converters, the only established alternative, are notoriously unreliable and make it clear to mobile users that the site owner regards them as second-class citizens, relegated to a separate information silo, and ostracized from web-based communities. Add the complexities of Web 2.0 features like real-time chat, tagging, event listings, and mapping, and the task is overwhelming.

What that means in practice is that we’ve already got 13,000 publishers to whose aggregated community members we serve over a half million pages (WAP and similar) a day. Most of the publishers are individual bloggers, but we also support BoingBoing, Make Magazine, and a couple of the Warner Music labels. WINKsite is a self-service system where anyone with a feed or a bunch of feeds can quickly build a mobile community environment that is fully integrated into the broadband Internet.

Connecting mobile communities into the broadband web (both 1.0 and 2.o) and aggregating them elegantly is what gets us out of bed every morning. Publishers come to us in order to serve a large portion of their users better — those users that want community resources are as mobile as they are. Those same people also spend time in traditional Internet environments, and we’re the right company to serve them in both places. Our tagging system nicely presents a ton of mobile information onto the web, but the mashed-up chat system is my favorite. From this Google Map, you can engage in live chats with mobile users all over the planet. And if you want all the Delhi, London, or San Francisco chats live on your blog, the web front ends are just Javascript segments that you can add wherever you like.

An experiment in gaming and application development for mobile devices.

Presented by the Digital Convergence Initiative of the Texas Technology Corridor, Film San Antonio, Critical Mass Interactive, and HBMG Foundation/ArtSpark. March 14th, 2005.

The DCI is looking to address the current influence of mobile devices on our culture. Mobile devices have had a tremendous effect on our society and we are interested in how that new audience might best be communicated to in this new medium. It is our belief that this new medium offers special consideration that have yet to be suitably identified; the least of which is viewing size. Other considerations for this new form are cost per download, as well ergonomic concerns, etc.

The Festival is looking for mobile content submissions that explore the mobile lifestyle. Submit your project now. Deadline is March 5th for Applications and Games, and March 1st for Films.

February 02, 2006

Of course we do. Now, I need a HDTV and a HD cable box from Comcast my cable provider and I'm all set. Now if the game is being fed in HD, I would presume that Comcast will offer it in HD. I'm still not sure why people who spend $3k+ for a new big screen HDTV, go and spend the $20 or so on rabbit ears to get HD. I'll assert that it's not that their cheep or frugal, although in some cases, I know that to be so, but rather it's a lack of education about just how much is available in HD from their current provider.

Rhode Island
isn't the only place in America that is
desperate to watch the Super Bowl in HD. Denver's Channel
7 is putting up a temporary antenna on top of the tallest building in the city. All we can picture is some dude
climbing the building with a coat hanger so his buddies can watch the game in HD. Funny picture.

We have had
numerous comments over the last few months that cited Denver's poor ABC over-the-air signal. The station indicated that
this tower should help with that signal. In case you were wondering why a large market like Denver is waiting to put up
a ATSC tower, you can blame some
local residents. According to CARE, Canyon Area Residents for the
Environment, they're concerned about an unsightly antenna and the 'dangerous' broadcast frequencies it
emits.